Emptying the Attic: The Family Archive in Transition

ABSTRACT

The genre of autobiography makes for a compelling platform from which to view the changing nature of remembrance, memory and narrative. Autobiography has in the past often described the author's encounter with the family archive, often a limited archive which at most provides the authors with letters, photographs, and diaries. Authors might revisit and reconstruct the family archive in their texts. This is a feature of autobiographical texts which draws attention to the writing moment, to the future oriented nature of the texts, and to the attempts the authors make, when searching for or trawling through the family archive, at discovering and reworking the past for the future. In the present day we are faced with profound changes to this archive through its digitization. There the emphasis is by default on preserving and remembering, possibly leading to an over-abundance of archival material the autobiographer has to grapple with. This paper will address the different challenges this technology poses to the politics and performance of memory in its trajectory from textual representation of the dispersed and limited family archive to the continuous recording and preservation we engage in with our daily self-expression on social media.

KEYWORDS:

• Family archive
• digitization
• self-expression
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 When referring to the digitized or the digital family archive, the meaning is twofold. On the one hand, it refers to the possibility of transferring older archival material into digital form, scanning letters, photographs, etc. On the other, it refers to how digital technology has replaced these older forms which means that most of such material is now only available to us in digital form.

2 According to Statista Facebook had roughly 2.91 billion users in the fourth quarter of 2021. The leading audience base is India with 350 million users and the US coming second with 193 million (Statista 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by University of Iceland Research Fund.

Notes on contributors

Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir

Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Iceland. Her main research interests are life writing and memory studies. Her books on these issues include Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (2003), Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (2017) and Iceland-Ireland: Memory, Literature, Culture on the Atlantic Periphery (2022).